More of a Comment Than a Question: Rounding Up Historical Materialism 2026

What happens when 1,090 Marxists, anarchists, labor organizers, activists, artists, and other radical thinkers gather in London’s School of African and Oriental Studies for three days and three hundred panels? While that may sound like a convoluted setup for a joke, the Historical Materialism (HM) conference has been running a version of this experiment for twenty-three editions. 

This year’s conference saw the reprisal of historic disputes pitting campism against anti-campism, but also a striking concentration on art and culture, with forty-two of its sessions occurring within a stream titled “Marxism, Culture, and the Arts.” These ranged from discussions on the aesthetics of US fascism and Joseph Beuys’s “expanded conception of art,” to the often invisibilized labor of assistance that sustains art institutions.

What accounts for this “cultural turn”? Is it the increasing scholasticism of the discourse surrounding contemporary art, the political radicalization of artists, or rather the curiosity amongst those elsewhere on the left to find an adequate form for fathoming the present, in and through artistic practice? To help bring HM 2026 into focus—as an event whose sheer size now refuses easy summary—we invited six participants to share what they saw, heard, and felt there.

—Editors

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Antonia Majaca

The art panels at Historical Materialism this year were so packed that latecomers sat on the floor, generously sharing the air and whatever else was going around, which testifies both to HM’s growing popularity and to the bodily discomfort Marxists will endure for a good panel. Most of us in those rooms make our living in Western universities and art institutions that the far right has in its sights, so the debate kept circling their autonomy and their relation to the state, and returning to one question: Can the left defend what remains of that autonomy without suspending its critique of the institutions themselves? With more artists and organizers in the room from Belgrade, Tbilisi, or Tirana, from Nairobi, Dhaka, Kathmandu, or New Delhi, the same question would arrive with others attached.

I suspect the institutions have already answered this question for us. What I have called the “imperial church of art” has swapped its liturgy of autonomy for one of safety, and the god it now serves openly is militarism. This church took its first sacrament in Kassel in 1955, when Documenta gave a city bombed for its tank factories a fresh coat of liberal modernism. The tank works now belong to Rheinmetall, and, as Rose-Anne Gush reminded us, the city is turning into dual-use infrastructure for German rearmament.

In 2022 Kassel saw the banner of the Indonesian collective Taring Padi come down at Documenta 15. What happened to their work next is a perverse parable of the art world. As Alex, one of its members, told us, the collective gave away the cardboard puppets that had stood around the banner as figures of the masses, and within a week they were for sale on eBay. This autumn they made twelve woodcuts for the Genoa dockworkers’ strike against arms shipments to Israel, and the dockworkers, out of pure respect, framed and hung them in the union office. Censored in Kassel, sold online, then honored in Genoa: The protest tool kept ending up on a wall. Yet this spring they moved into a Venetian squat, repainted its façade with the neighbors’ kids, and printed posters for the Biennale strike.

The more useful question, then, is which infrastructures of our own we are building, and with whom, to which HM offered answers. Marco Baravalle calls such practices “alter-institutions,” built through autonomous cooperation rather than granted by the art system. Anjalika Sagar of the Otolith Group spoke about her work at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin camp and invoked political education. Shourideh C. Molavi reminded us that visibility does not produce accountability and called for strategic and affective agitation. And Andreas Petrossiants gave us the most hopeful image, a flooded tree pit in Bed-Stuy that neighbors stocked with fish and turned into an aquarium, where people started talking about housing.

Far more attention is given to the status of art institutions than to what art does when people use it to organize a neighborhood or teach each other how the world works, which is what art has always been for at its most radical. Such art has roots, but they run through lineages of struggle people choose and the social relations they actually live in, their metabolism with the soil included, which is why the far right can keep its blood but not the soil. A broad new anti-fascist popular front is going to need a lot of such work.

Sam Dolbear

Speak, attendees; where do we stand?

In my HM paper this year, I spoke about my tendency, when writing about the AIDS crisis, to alight upon anecdotes of fate, chance, and coincidence. I spoke about Martin Wong’s final painting Did I Have a Chance? (1999) and his repeated depiction of dice and Magic 8 Balls. I spoke about Rosa von Praunheim’s film A Virus Knows No Morals (1986), in which a group of HIV/AIDS nurses throw dice every night to decide who dies and who survives the following day. I spoke about Peter Hujar’s photographs of Candy Darling on her death bed, where he would go on to die thirteen years later. I spoke about Caroline Aherne dressing up as her TV persona Mrs. Merton (perhaps her first mention at HM) to experience an age she ultimately wasn’t able to experience, and how that resonated with Weyland Flower’s aged puppet “Madame.” HM is a place of friendship and comradeship but also a place to project your own denunciation. To preempt my own, in my paper, I summoned a VOICE OF INTERNAL DOUBT AND DIALOGUE. I addressed my superegos, asked them if my turn to stories of the fated, the circumstantial, the coincidental, to the “sensation of the anecdote,” has any relation to my commitment to Marxism as a universal and true science of analysis and liberation, or if it reflects something of my personality, a pathology indulged for too long, that I’m drawn to these swirls in the frosted icing on the histories of death and suffering, even (or especially) if that frosting invokes a sensation of “oh” or “wow” or “really.” I wondered if I was just concerned with a rehash of the debates on the early Marx vs. the late Marx, the Marx of history vs. the Marx of science, the Marx of the “Eighteenth Brumaire” vs. the Marx of Capital, and the Marxism of the cold vs. the warm streams. Maybe the answer is in a division of labor, and this is why HM now has twenty-two parallel sessions, so that all temperatures of the stream can be accounted for at all moments—something that induces a constant and spiraling feeling of missing out. I wondered what temperature we were bathing in, in our panel, and thought it was mostly warm, with its tepid moments. Superegos persist hard. With our comrades, we temper them.

Miriam Stoney

My first time at HM: I only attended the weekend panels—on the Sunday taking part in the prelaunch event for Assistances: On Reproductive Labour in the Arts with the book’s editors Tamara Antonijević and Christopher Weickenmeier, moderated by Joshua Wicke, and joined by Danny Hayward and Andreas Petrossiants. It was presumably a logical consequence of my own interest and investment in a certain idea of “art” that most of the discussions I was privy to over the two days were dominated by white (or white-passing) academics, theorists, thinkers, and writers. Apparently normal for HM, which takes place at the School of African and Oriental Studies, by the way. Many nominally concerned with artistic practices, very few self-declared artists themselves. Still, obviously some sense that art as a field of inquiry—its production, on the one hand, its consumption through study and critique, on the other—offers an invaluable case study for historical materialism today. Something to do with the claim to art’s autonomy, I think, but also—as social reproduction theory (SRT) shows us—with the forms of labor that go into sustaining that delusion. The various panels took up “art” more or less tendentiously, according to their own purposes. The launch of the posthumous publication Infrastructural Critique: Contemporary Art Between Reproduction and Abolition by Marina Vishmidt, edited by Larne Abse Gogarty, Danny Hayward, and Kerstin Stakemeier, raised questions about what a sincere theorist and political organizer like Vishmidt was even doing dedicating her invaluable time, effort, and thinking to such a vacuous subject (my read of the room) as exhibitions in art institutions. The answer was, obviously, pragmatism. Many voices audible at HM expressed a longing for or expectation of politically engaged artistic practices that would actively address or intervene in the many social, political , and economic woes the conference diagnosed simultaneously. One panel on “radical curating” suggests an “alter-institution”—sounds to me like being taken out of a cozy and well-oiled frying pan and flung into a curator’s purgatory of social relevance. I would rather be forever irrelevant. Hence my personal highlight: “Poor Art—Poor Life” with Anne Boyer, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Danny Hayward, and Daniel Spaulding. Roving around poverty, austerity, mediation, and eating shit. Noted the words “give need back to form” and thought, genuinely, “Wow.” Very helpful for our panel on assistance in the arts, which took the double disavowal of the assistant’s subjectivity (you shouldn’t speak and if you do, only as someone’s assistant) to underwrite the fictitious autonomy of the artist. Yeah, art does suck and it does so by extracting lack. But that doesn’t mean artists should be heading labor unions (as one interlocutor bemoaned) but maybe just shutting the fuck up, for once. She says.

Claire Fontaine

Anita Chari’s book A User’s Manual to Claire Fontaine, recently translated into Italian and launched at HM 2026, inspired the eponymous Claire Fontaine solo show cocurated by Chari and Simone Ciglia at the Fondazione La Rocca, Pescara, due to open December 20, 2026. The exhibition is an experiment in spatializing the theoretical journey of the book by juxtaposing in space Chari’s words and the artworks they refer to, disarticulating the dichotomy between explanation and illustration, verbal and visual. At the HM panel, Helena Reckitt, Christian Sorace, Claire Fontaine, and the author discussed ways of touching the world with words and images in times of war, censorship, and genocide, proposing to sharpen our collective awareness through intersectional and interdisciplinary ways of thinking, snatching abstraction from whiteness and patriarchy and making it into a tool for emancipation. Reckitt reflected on how some of Fontaine’s works, read by Chari, act as a resonating chamber for our present and for a feminist sensibility. “Claire Fontaine’s art,” she stated “provokes encounters with things that we know but try not to recognize, things that we routinely repress or push to the side.” Expanding the horizon of as-yet-ungrasped possibilities, values, and lives, it simulates our capacities for a sensibility that can “touch the world it wants to transform.” Relatedly, Sorace wondered, “How do words get under our skin?,” focusing on Human Animals (an artwork defined by Fontaine as a self-portrait) as a means of channeling both the capacity to understand the contradictions of our time and the need to exit our paralysis. Sorace described how, in this work,

the word is no longer disembodied. It flashes. It haunts. It addresses. Or, as in the case of the brickbats, books can become material weapons, or dead weight, foundation stones, or rubble, it is always hard to tell. To paraphrase Anita [Chari], the brickbats liberate knowledge production for other kinds of uses. 

Fulvia Carnevale, half of the artist collective, insisted on the centrality of the notion of the “human strike” to grasp the importance of the book as both a refusal to perform a docile intellectual exercise and an attempt to transform the subjectivities of the writer and the readers within the liminal, experimental space between art, philosophy, politics, and somatic practice that it discloses. Chari concluded by observing that

to be activated, for the privatized liberal subject, is in some sense to be harmed. But in reality, the harm lies in the structures that produce the violence we shield ourselves from daily, simply in order to survive. We need an artwork that activates us, rather than seducing and reducing us to bare life. The question is how we can connect with our profound collective vulnerability as human beings in a time of planetary disasters, fascism, and genocide, while recognizing the unequal distribution of such violence.

Kerstin Stakemeier

The difference between developing and publishing individually authored academic work and partaking in collective processes destined to generate interventions of decidedly impersonal authorship begins to blur from both ends at HM. When people speak as V. I. Lenin did—a genre which seemed to enjoy a quite enthusiastic revival this year—impersonalization does not need a collective. One man will suffice. A lot of individually authored academic work on and at HM both risks and desires its impersonalization. This is what makes HM serious fun. I love it. It makes sense (where other, more academically inclined conferences often don’t, because a thematically grouped bunch of individuals longing to be recognized primarily for their disagreements are mostly just unbearably senseless). Being impersonalized into HM amounts to something of a goal, while failing at this endeavor presents as more personal the harder one attempts it. Within HM it is hard to imagine something more shattering than publicly recommitting oneself to academia. And I write within historical materialism, because outside of it, Lenin’s successor famously established a whole range of more shattering practices of discharging the failed. It even seemed that this need for impersonalization started seeping into some of the panels dedicated to art this year, a genre of production famous for undoing any hard-won political manifestation through the simple gesture of attributing it to a heroic author, and the arc of an oeuvre. (And I do want everybody to read Marina Vishmidt’s Infrastructural Critique: Contemporary Art Between Reproduction and Abolition, which Danny Hayward, Larne Abse Gogarty, and I just published with Verso. I really do.) However, the quest for impersonality and its lamentable descent into personalized undoings was the most audible on the panels through which the ongoing confrontation between “campism” and “anti-campism” extended itself, an antagonism that had already ruptured some of HM London 2025. I end on this statement so that some of you who did not attend this or other HMs will start looking into those two words, because a lot of historical materialism is stored behind them. Much of which is burning today.

Andreas Petrossiants

You can’t be in two places at once. You certainly can’t be at twenty panels at once. I flirted with writing about the things I wanted to go to but couldn’t—critical-fabulation-cum-report-back: the launch of Pinko magazine’s fifth issue; “The Organization of Pessimism,” in two parts!; the launch of Jacopo Galimberti and Wright’s book The Year of Living Dangerously; the panel “Sudan’s War and Its Lessons for Rethinking Labor, Class, and the State”; another remembering Asad Haider. But structuring a report in the register of “should” seems misplaced. As Joshua Clover criticized prescriptive communist politics, which applies to Marxist conference FOMO as well: “The subjunctive is a lovely mood, but it is not the mood of historical materialism.”1

At the launch of Rose-Anne Gush’s book Artistic Labor of the Body, we talked about the body as socially mediated material for artistic practice. Later on, Hannah Proctor worked through several psychoanalysts who tried to understand Black revolt, radicalism, and anger from armchairs in the 1960s but struggled to see that struggle against white supremacy was not a product of individualized psychic pain. Sam Dolbear and Larne Abse Gogarty both brought in beautiful artworks dealing with queer sociality, AIDS activism, and the historical memory of spaces like the London Lighthouse and wishing wells from Stonewall to San Francisco.

Danny Hayward, Kerstin Stakemeier, Rosie Stockton, and Maxi Wallenhorst talked about love, destitution, reproduction, and carceral poetics. Another room full of love, and my primary reason for making the transatlantic journey, was the launch of Marina Vishmidt’s Infrastructural Critique, where the editors of the book and panelists underscored Marina’s commitment to organizing in and with social forms regardless of our critique of how they currently function. Now that the book is out, the editors shared, it can circulate and inspire critique, engagement, and organization. Marina’s radically open project can continue to grow.

I wonder what kind of love could help us think through the campist/anti-campist debates, or in other words how our movements can incorporate anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism on a terrain which works to structurally exclude all three. I take three things (among others) from a powerful panel with Ben Mabie, Salar Mohandesi, and Nasser Abourahme: 1. Lenin’s “other theory” of imperialism sketched by Mohandesi, which deserves attention; 2. Alberto Toscano’s comment from the audience that we must identify how to support anti-imperialist struggle beyond a performatively raised fist; 3. Abourahme’s reply that anti-anti-campism isn’t the same thing as campism. Point taken. I could not see Iman Gangi and Bahar Noorizadeh’s presentation, so I quote them writing last year: “Resisting the Pahlavist right and the state’s counterrevolutionary authoritarian project, while refusing imperialist solutions … leaves only a difficult and narrow space for any meaningful alternative. But in a situation where no viable leftist force yet exists, it is the only space available.”2

At Saturday’s plenary, where Toscano offered a preliminary definition of (techno)fascism (“a preventative counterrevolution of property”), he also reminded us of what Mario Tronti declared in the same room many years ago: “We have to make the bourgeoisie afraid again.” Let’s do so.